In the time it’ll take you to read this, another American will have died from not having health insurance

Researchers from Harvard Medical School say the lack of coverage can be tied to about 45,000 deaths a year in the United States — a toll that is greater than the number of people who die each year from kidney disease.

“If you extend coverage, you can save lives,” said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard who is one of the study’s authors. The research is being published in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health and was posted online Thursday.

via Harvard Medical Study Links Lack of Insurance to 45,000 U.S. Deaths a Year – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.

This study by researchers at Harvard Medical School — which was conducted by numerous physicians who are a part of the health care advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which advocates for a sort of Medicare-for-all single payer health care system — illustrates better than any sort of facts or figures I’ve seen during this entire health care debate the sort of nightmare this country tries to pass off as a health care system.

So much of the discussion we’ve been having about health care in the past few months seems to have been focused around really abstract terms — “cost curves,” “health insurance exchanges,” and the “public option.” While these are all really important elements of the health policy debate, they aren’t things — with the possible exception here of the public option, which has become the rallying cry for those who see it as an alternative to our private insurance, employer-based system — which the average person can really resonate with. To many average Americans, this sort of rhetoric just isn’t something they can relate to.

But the findings of the Harvard study aren’t like that. They, more than anything else thrown around in the news over health care recently, highlight the most stark realities of our current health care system, if you can call it that: it is killing people. As PNHP’s Dr. John Geyman notes, it’s killing one American every 12 minutes. That’s something everyone can understand, and that’s why we need the information unveiled in this study to be splashed over the front page of every newspaper in the country. It’s that important.

I’m not arguing that it would increase support for drastic reforms to our health care system. If anything, polling data has shown for years that Americans want to see some sort of universal health care system. There’s even significant evidence that most Americans support a single-payer, Medicare-for-all style health care system, where the government is the sole provider of a universal insurance system, a solution that is much more to the left than what is being proposed in Congress right now (and which many argue would be much more efficient and cost-effective).

But this isn’t really about winning over the public. The public is, for the most part, already on the side of reformers. What makes the Harvard study so important is that it outrages people. It makes them angry that the richest country on earth is losing more people every year because they can’t pay for health coverage than it is losing to all the homicides in the country put together.

If people knew that, maybe they’d go beyond telling a pollster they support universal care and then going about their daily lives. Maybe they’d write letters to their member of Congress, or get op-eds in their newspapers, or even get out into the streets in the same way we often see our neighbors in Europe demonstrating for their rights.

Thomas Frank sums up this problem best in his Wall Street Journal piece today:

The health-care showdown should have been a one-sided blowout. And yet it is the Democrats who are running to the playground monitor and watching their support drain away.

Why? Because from the beginning they have understood the problem primarily as a technical consumer issue, not a bid for social justice in a manifestly unjust time. In their criticism of the insurance industry they have largely avoided terms like “profiteering” in favor of dry talk about lower costs and more competition—hardly an ideal platform from which to launch a crusade.

So what would be happening if the Democrats advocated all out war on the insurers — not only by changing their rhetoric from that of wonkish technocrats to something average Americans understand, but by actually advocating kicking the insurance cartels out of the health care process altogether? If that happened, maybe we wouldn’t be debating about whether or not to put a watered down public option into health care legislation, but instead about how quickly the government can act to fundamentally reshape our health care system from the ground up so that we would finally be on par with the rest of the industrialized world and not have our citizens losing their homes due to health care bills or dying because they don’t have coverage. We would be a country well on its way to being civilized, and not one where another person just died roughly in the amount of time it took you to read this, because the richest country on earth couldn’t care for them.